The Costs of Safety Are Rising

Almost everyone will agree that the first duty of government is safety. Liberal or Conservative, even the most ardent advocates agree that keeping our families safe is the first duty of a government.

Here in Lake Forest there is a debate about how “safe” we are. The topic came up Tuesday night at the Candidate Forum and once more, Councilman Scott Voigts choose to lie to the people about the true facts. He points out that in a study using FBI data of crime rate by city size, using cities from 75,000 and up, Lake Forest turns out to be #15 in terms of the lowest crime rate. That sounds good.

What he fails to mention is that the greatest predictor of crime rate IS city size, so the more people, the higher the rate. If your study begins at 75,000 people, all the cities with 75,000 people will have lower rates than cities with 5,000,000. That’s a simple statistical fact. If you turned around and did a different study, this time using cities from 1,000 to 75,000, you’d find that the cities with 75,000 had the highest rates.

Lake Forest happens to have 78,000 people, so when it is compared with cities with much bigger populations it has a lower crime rate. When you compare it to cities with much smaller populations, it has a higher rate.

Technically it’s called a statistical artefact, but Voigts never talks about that, and instead touts the results of the study as if, in reality, we really did have one of the lowest crime rates in the U.S. We do not. When you look at all 20,000+ cities, instead of the 400+ that have populations over 75,000, we don’t even show up in the top 500.

We are not one of the safest cities in the U.S. and that’s a fact.

Voigts and McCullough are dishonest when they quote from that study, but with their limited intellectual abilities you might expect them not to understand the subtleties. City Manager Dunek, OTOH, understands them but also uses the results of the report to give a false impression.

Put aside for a moment the problems inherent in studies of this nature, and just look around us. Irvine and Mission Viejo are much larger than Lake Forest, yet they have lower crime rates. That’s an anomaly that suggests that we have a crime problem here. In fact, among our neighbors, we have one of the highest crime rates in the region, whether the cities are bigger or smaller than we are. That suggests clearly we have a crime problem. Perhaps not as bad as Detroit or Baltimore, but certainly there is no reason that most of our neighbors should have lower crimes rates than we have.

Putting aside the fact that our crime rate is higher than it should be, there is another problem. A recent report by the OC Register Watchdog reported that among the 34 cities in Orange County, Lake Forest had the 10th highest rate of rising costs – 57% - between 2003 and 2013. The 57% increase is higher than many of our neighbors including San Clemente (53%), Irvine (52%), RSM (51%), Laguna Niguel (49%), and Laguna Hills (35%), although it wasn‘t as bad as Laguna Woods (81%) and Mission Viejo (76%). But coming in #10 out of 34 is nothing to be complacent about, especially when we are talking about the single highest part of our budget – public safety.

So we have a dual problem – a higher than normal crime rate and a higher than normal increasing costs of public safety.

Next we’ll talk about some implications of this dual problem.

About Jim Gardner

Dr. Jim Gardner is running for City Council in Lake Forest. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook.

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